Wednesday, July 14, 2010

 
Doktor's Tochter

From The Sunday Times
June 13, 2010
Short story: Mom

'It looks like the mouth of a sea creature'
Sara Lenzen

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Saint George and the Dragon
Her arm never fully developed and is only half the length it should have been. It ends in a stump and in the middle of the stump there are five nail-less, tiny fingers grouped together in a useless frozen fist. It looks like the mouth of a sea creature.
We are not accumulators. The small basement apartment my mother and I share is evidence of what we do not buy and of what we give away. We own one floral couch, which I use as my bed and that is propped up by a thick geometry textbook. We own one chair and one table. In the cupboard there are only two plates and four cups. The stove has not worked in years. The only thing hanging on the wall is a Ronald Reagan calendar that I bought ironically. It is December and Ron and Nancy are wearing holiday sweaters and smiling at me. I imagine sitting in between them on the davenport. We all reach for a handful of popcorn at the same time. Our fingers touch. We laugh. We laugh so hard that the blood vessels around our eyes burst and we each get two black eyes. When we go into town for breakfast the next morning the other people in the diner stare at us and whisper. They cannot tell if we are monsters or victims.
“Hello?” my mother calls from inside of her bedroom.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m home,” I say and open her door. She is laying supine on the bed playing a casino game on a cheap laptop. The robotic jingling of electronic coins echoes through the air.
“Oh, did your new boyfriend give you that?” she asks and points to the painting that I have tucked under my armpit.
“No. He wants me to keep it for him while he’s in New York. There was a robbery in his condominium last week,” I say and hold it across my chest like a shield.
My mother carefully wrenches herself from the bed. She is wearing an XXL men’s T-shirt that hangs down to her knees. It is neon-blue and has PARTY ANIMAL written in white block letters.
“Wow,” she says, dragging the word out. She grabs the painting with her right hand and holds it two inches from her face and then holds it as far away as her arm will stretch.
“It’s a Salvador Dali — Saint George and the Dragon. It’s worth money,” I say.
“No kidding? Well, it is beautiful,” she says and props it up against a broken console record player that she uses as a television stand.
I sit on the edge of the bed with her and we stare at the painting. We lean close to it and cock our heads to the right and then to the left.
“Who is Salvador Dali?”she asks.
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it’s real and it’s worth a lot of money,” I answer, and grab the painting and slide it under her bed.
“Don’t touch it or look at or breathe on it,” I say while on my knees, positioning the Dali.
“It is too nice to keep here,” she says and folds back her left sleeve, exposing her birth defect. Her arm never fully developed and is only half the length it should have been. It ends in a stump and in the middle of the stump there are five nail-less, tiny fingers grouped together in a useless frozen fist. It looks like the mouth of a sea creature. It looks like it lives in the deepest part of the ocean where everything is dark and ancient and alien.
“We can have nice things. There is no law against it,” I say.
I leave and go into the living room and lay down on the couch. It is raining heavily and the smell of mould is beginning to seep through the walls. My mother starts up a new computer game. This one has a jungle theme and I fall asleep to the sound of nattering monkeys and rain.
I am awoken in the middle of the night by a phone call. It is my boyfriend. He has changed his mind and wants the Dali back. He is reconciling with his estranged wife. They have been up all night talking. He will be by the next night to get his painting.
“You can’t have it back. You gave it to me!”
I yell into the phone. The power of this lie is overwhelming and feels good and righteous.
He tells me to calm down and that he will be by to get it. If I make trouble he will call the police.
I hang up and scream into my pillow. My mother shuffles out of her bedroom. She is naked except for a bed sheet that she has wrapped around herself like a toga.
“What is it?” She asks. She sits down next to me on the couch and rubs her stump back and forth across my back. I cry and hiccup and pinch myself on the inside of my thighs.
“I need to leave town for a little while,” I say.
“I need to get out of this place.”
“Where will you go?” she asks.
“I’ll go to Vancouver and stay with Ginger. She has an extra room. Maybe I can go back to school finally. This could be a good thing, you know?”
My mother stands up and goes into the kitchen and runs the water.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
The next morning I begin to pack. I have set myself a limit of one suitcase. My mother is sitting at the table scribbling in a hardcover mystery novel.
“What are you doing?” I ask and look over her shoulder. She is circling all of the pronouns and crossing out all of the verbs.
“Why are you doing that?!”
“Because I’ve already read it,” she answers.
“That is serial-killer-type behaviour,” I say and continue packing. I decide to take the Dali with me. If he wants it back that bad he can come to Vancouver to get it, I think.
I go into my mother’s bedroom and thrust my arm beneath the bed to grab it, but it’s gone. My heart begins to race quickly and cold sweat pools in the centre of my palms. I stomp into the living room.
“Where is it?!”
She doesn’t look up from her book. She circles a pronoun. She deletes a verb.
“Where is it?!”
“It is not here any more,” she says slowly.
“You f***ing stupid bitch!” I scream and pound my fist down on the table. “Okay, okay,” I say and begin walking around in circles. “I knew you were an idiot. You have no idea who Dali even f***ing was. Maybe this wasn’t your fault. Did my boyfriend come by when I was sleeping and demand it back?”
“I thought he was in New York,” she says, not looking at me.
“So he didn’t come. Okay. So, did you pawn it? Did you give it away? Did you light it on fire?”
“It is somewhere safe,” she says. “When you come back from Vancouver someday I’ll give it back to you.”
I scream and slap myself on the sides of my head and pull my hair.
“You stupid cripple! You make me sick!” I yell in her face and fall to my knees. And then I see it — a turquoise forked dragon tongue poking out from under the couch. I crawl over to it and pull out the painting and lay it in front of me. My mother puts down the book and sits next to me on the floor.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want you to go,” she says.
“I thought you wouldn’t leave without it.”
“Oh,” I say quietly.
I reach forward and run my hands along the edges of the painting. Saint George’s face is featureless and cast down. His sword pierces through the soft pink palate of the dragon’s mouth, and the beast’s eyes become wild with anger. In the background, a nude woman raises her hand to her forehead as if she is going to faint. The three of them appear to be stuck in this cave and in this moment of struggle for ever, but in the upper right corner Dali has painted a small opening in the cave wall. Through the opening there is the horizon and below that a spot of blue to suggest an ocean and an escape.
“Okay, I won’t go,” I say and rest my head on her shoulder.

Sun Country
"Do you ever think about me?" I ask. As soon as I hear the words I want to stomp myself in the gut. I sound so needy and I'm probably reminding him of a troubled ex-girlfriend who calls him once a year after she's finished some wine and is feeling horny.
I see him, for the first time since I was 10 years old, on a Sun Country airlines flight. My fingers dig into the armrests and I close my eyes when my mother, who is direct in a mostly gentle way, squeezes my knee.
“When. He. Gets. Up. To. Pee. He. Is. Going. To. See. Us.”
I can smell her denture-friendly chewing gum as she leans in close to my left ear and whispers to me that she knows I believe this epic coincidence of him being on our flight is a test from God, but it isn’t, and besides, you don’t believe in God. It really isn’t, and she will go over to him and say hello and tell him not to approach.
“No, no, no,” I say to her in a blank, impersonal way, like we’re strangers and I’ve just helped her fix a flat tyre and she’s trying to give me a 20 for the trouble.
I stand up and begin to walk down the aisle towards him in my stockinged feet. I see the elbow of his navy suit jacket and his gold watch around his hairy wrist and the plastic cup of white wine in his hand tilted forward so much that my arm automatically jolts halfway up, like I am going to stop it from spilling.
I begin to take another step forward when there is this little boy, all of a sudden, Velcroed to my body, with his nose buried in my belly button.
“Whoa! Whoa!” I say and push him back a bit so we are standing several inches apart, stockinged foot to stockinged foot.
He is wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pyjamas and a green sweatband around his head, which is cocked to the right a bit and his thin little-kid hair is jutting out in all directions.
He looks me in the eye and folds his arms across his chest, covering up the bottom half of a mutant turtle’s face so just its red Zorro-type mask and its black-and-white cartoon eyes are visible. I throw him a cowboy squint and fold my arms around my stomach, and we hold our positions like we are a couple of honchos and like everything was leading up to this moment.
“Hi.”
My father has recognised me and is standing in the aisle now with his arms folded across his chest as well. He looks like Peter Sellers, but with a more Midwestern vibe and pockmarks and an American-flag tie with an American-flag tie clip.
“Nice tie,” I say deadpan.
“Nice T-shirt,” he says deadpan.
I glance down and am reminded that my T-shirt reads “Sit on my face and party”.
“Thanks, it’s sort of my mission statement,” I say.
He smirks, arches an eyebrow and steps closer. The little kid in the sweatband is standing in between, looking up and back and forth at us, confused.
“Dad,” the little kid says to my father, “I have to peeeee!” He squeals and tugs at his penis.
“Oh, sorry,” I say and move out of the way. He bounds to the bathroom in his little stockinged feet and the noise echoes throughout the dark, humming cabin.
“You met Kurt when he was a baby, right?” my father asks, pointing in the direction of the boy.
“Oh, yeah, wow. I didn’t recognise him… This is so weird, right?”
“Yeah, it is. How old are you now, then?” he asks.
“Seventeen,” I say. My voice is shaky now and I am playing with my hair. I don’t know what to do with my body and it sort of spasms into a half-curtsy.
“Are you okay?” my father asks, but does not move closer. I scan the cabin and most of the other passengers are asleep.
My mother is pretending to be napping, but just as I look in her direction she opens one eye and I point to my father. She gives him a lazy wave and a smile, then pretends to fall asleep again.
“Yeah, yes, I’m fine… I just… do you ever think about me?” I ask, and as soon as I hear the words I want to stomp myself in the gut. I sound so needy and clingy and I’m probably reminding him of some troubled ex-girlfriend who still calls him once a year after she finishes a bottle of wine and is feeling horny. Now he’s never going to be my best friend. Now we are never going to share that tandem bike ride along the river in Amsterdam.
Before he can answer, my little brother, in his stockinged feet, runs up to me and tugs at my shirt. I swoop him up by the armpits and he is impossibly light in this dim, shaky plane passing, now, over the mountains.

Sara Lenzen is an American writer, living and studying in London. Read her writer's ritual on the Fast Fiction blog at www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/magazine

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